Procession and Sacred Landscape

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The idea of a sacralized landscape is popularly associated with site-specific Native American religious beliefs and practices, but a landscape and its features can have religious meaning for other people as well. This paper examines the northern New Mexican folk-Catholic tradition of religious procession. Processions belong to a genre of human ritual behavior that involves symbolic discourse through spatial practice. They reference a relationship between those in the procession and the specific topography or territory through which they pass. From an ethnographic standpoint a procession is an observable behavioral event and also a complex communicative text. Such cultural texts are about those who perform them and they symbolically encode peoples’ collective relationship to the place where they live. Processions ritually inscribe a circuit or pathway around or through a territory sacralized by constructed sites such as altars, oratorios (built shrines), chapels, churches, camposantos (cemeteries), moradas (Penitente chapter houses), calvarios (large crosses), and sometimes descansos (smaller crosses commemorating a deceased individual). In the Catholic world processions are spatial events that occur within a temporal framework or religious calendar based symbolically on the life and passion of Christ and the lives of saints.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23144